Meet James Tyler Shaw

We were lucky to catch up with James Tyler Shaw recently and have shared our conversation below.

James Tyler, looking forward to learning from your journey. You’ve got an amazing story and before we dive into that, let’s start with an important building block. Where do you get your work ethic from?

A key concept that I learned from both punk rock and the cult cinema world is that freedom takes work. If you really want to make something that is uniquely you. If you want to do it without comprise. If you want to do it in a way that is one hundred percent true to your ethics, then you have to be ready to role up your sleeves and put in the hours and wear a lot of hats, because every element you farm out to a company or corporation will take a little bit of your authority with it. Beyond that, there is a beauty to the DIY approach and I find this applies just as much to cinema as to music. There’s a beauty to the idea of DC punks hand cutting album sleeves. There’s a beauty to Peter Jackson baking rubber alien masks in his mother’s oven for “Bad Taste”. It’s the beauty of something handmade rather than mass produced, and I think it results in a kind of spiritual connection with the audience. It’s a human to human relationship instead of human to institution to human. But it requires deliberately doing things the hard way. So the extra labor you put into these works becomes something kind of spiritual and it injects an element into the films that I feel a lot of movies lack nowadays. It doesn’t have to be pretty. It often isn’t. The power comes from your passion, not from perfection. So the New Film Underground is all about celebrating filmmakers who take that DIY approach and are willing to put their own sweat and blood into their work.

Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?

I’m a filmmaker and founder of Take Your Medicine and Smile Productions and the New Film Underground screening series. TYMAS and the NFU really started with me feeling alienated from Los Angeles movie culture. What I’ve always loved most about cinema is its fringes, the wildest and weirdest parts, and here everything is so Hollywood-centric that it seemed there was no place for people like me. Now, I tend to think, if you have a difficult problem, the thing to do is find other people who have the same problem and then combine your resources and skills to solve the problem for each other. So, Take Your Medicine and Smile Productions and The New Film Underground shows were started around 2015ish as a way of doing that for underground cinema lovers in Los Angeles. We celebrate the ridiculous amount of cinematic talent here that is just too weird to get attention from the big institutions. The New Film Underground screenings showcase these contemporary fringe films, give audiences an experience that is truly wild and unpredictable, and they also provide a place for underground cinema fans to meet each other and feel seen. It’s always been important to me that the shows be almost like a church potluck; a friendly communal event where we share short films instead of casseroles. I love seeing familiar faces at our shows, and I think it’s meaningful for people to go some place where they know people are happy to see them. I think a lot of people need that in this town. And then Take Your Medicine and Smile Productions actually helps short films get made, and more importantly, helps filmmakers help each other by bringing them together. The community has really grown over the last few years. I’m excited for what new frontiers we will discover, and I’m looking forward to bringing even more people into the fold, (Next show is December 7th if you want to be one of those people).

There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?

The first quality that has been important to me is extreme openness. I really think you have to let your mind wander into the absurd in order to find the really interesting, important ideas. Our preconceived ideas of what is and isn’t rational or possible box us in and box society in. I would also say friendliness is equally important. There’s a lot of loneliness in our world and one of the most valuable contributions you can make, regardless of your field, is making people feel wanted. The third quality that I value is just having a good sense of humor, not taking yourself too seriously. Things get messy. Stuff goes wrong. Mistakes are made. It helps if you can laugh at yourself.

One of our goals is to help like-minded folks with similar goals connect and so before we go we want to ask if you are looking to partner or collab with others – and if so, what would make the ideal collaborator or partner?

I’m always on the look out for talented, adventurous filmmakers. TYMAS is in the process of putting together an ambitious anthology project and of course we are always collecting short films for The New Film Underground shows. If you’re a producer with a heart for the strange and experimental, we’ve got projects coming and will need a couple good producers to help organize those. So, if you’re a producer or want to be a crew member, you can always shoot an e-mail to takeyourmedicineandsmile@gmail.com. Filmmakers can always send their short films to alternativeshortfilm@gmail.com.

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